Beyond the Individual: A Community-Engaged Framework for Ethical Online Community Research

TL;DR

The paper addresses the ethics of research on online communities by foregrounding community-level harms and benefits and collecting input from four critical communities through nine participatory workshops. It introduces the FACTORS framework (Functions for Action with Communities: Teaching, Overseeing, Reciprocating, Sustaining) to guide ethical engagements that align research with community goals while safeguarding resources and governance. The study provides empirical insights into how communities perceive harms, justify safeguards, and demand accountability, and it offers a practical checklist and mechanisms to implement the framework. Together, these contributions offer a path toward more responsible, community-centered online research with implications for researchers, community organizers, and policy discussions around governance and ethics in CSCW/HCI.

Abstract

Online community research routinely poses minimal risk to individuals, but does the same hold true for online communities? In response to high-profile breaches of online community trust and increased debate in the social computing research community on the ethics of online community research, this paper investigates community-level harms and benefits of research. Through 9 participatory-inspired workshops with four critical online communities (Wikipedia, InTheRooms, CaringBridge, and r/AskHistorians) we found researchers should engage more directly with communities' primary purpose by rationalizing their methods and contributions in the context of community goals to equalize the beneficiaries of community research. To facilitate deeper alignment of these expectations, we present the FACTORS (Functions for Action with Communities: Teaching, Overseeing, Reciprocating, and Sustaining) framework for ethical online community research. Finally, we reflect on our findings by providing implications for researchers and online communities to identify and implement functions for navigating community-level harms and benefits.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Paper outline: using community-engaged workshops to understand how research should avoid community-level harms and enhance community-level benefits.
• Figure 2: Sources of qualitative data. Participants' onboarding survey answers were used to seed workshop activities, Discussion transcript, activity artifacts, participant feedback, community feedback, and community rules were analyzed to inform our results.
• Figure 3: FACTORS Framework.
• Figure 4: Bar charts displaying the distribution of responses by community to each of the four question categories (Bridging Differences, Quality, Influence, and Power) based on the Community Engagement Survey wallerstein2020engage. Questions in Quality, Influence, and Power were scored on a 7-point Likert scale, reflecting the extent to which participants agreed that their experience reflected the values corresponding to each category. Questions in Bridging Differences were assessed on a Likert scale evaluating the extent to which participants felt our research team facilitated positive dialog during workshops. Overall, participants had very favorable perceptions of the [Redacted for Review]-community partnership.